The mind through the looking glass, and what we found there.

The most powerful idea is the abstraction. Maybe it’s not exactly an idea in itself, but it’s a process. Since ideas are a plan of action for something, abstraction is an action on ideas.

When something is powerful, it is potentially dangerous. All power brings danger and risk. The risk of abstraction is recursion. Abstraction is the image of something, it is a mirror.

Perhaps the first time that the human being faces in the mirror is the moment that for the first time perceives its capacity of abstraction. He looks at his own image and can identify that figure as the container of his existence. It recognizes that image in the mirror as the container of the “I”.

Mirrors reflect something. Reflection is a word associated ate same time with mirrors and thought. A reflection is a daughter of abstraction. The interesting of the mirrors are when they are placed one before the other they provoke the infinite reflection. In the same way that put the abstraction over the the abstraction.

It opens up an infinite hole, both ways, up and down, so that if someone falls into a hole of mirrors he would not know if it is falling or rising, or both at the same time.

To fall into this hole is to realize that: The recursion is the mirror in front of the mirror. Starting an infinite process. It is abstraction abstracting itself. That abstracts abstraction from abstraction from abstraction. And so on.. This is good or bad? Letting this process take you. You are was falling or rising?

This dichotomy of the gravity of the hole can make you feel panic (up, down). The deeper the levels of mirrors are, the longer the wavelength that throws us from top to bottom. The more agitated is the mind.

We live in the world of abstraction from the abstraction of abstraction … A race to create products, services and ideas with a greater level of generality.

Escher — Gallery — 1946. Going up or down in the abstraction hole is a matter of perspective.

Buddhists have the concept of levels of consciousness. Consciousness is the science of knowledge itself. The levels of consciousness are therefore the levels of abstraction that the “me” is. From this point of view certain people are like Native American Indians before contact with European settlers. They live in the world where they have never seen a mirror. And his consciousness is of a more immediate and immediate nature. Later the mirror was something that fascinated the Indians. Perhaps by the tempting nature of abstraction.

The artist Yayoi Kusama works with the idea of to be in the world of mirrors.

The image of ourselves in this mirror of reflection intrigues us. What is the image motifs? What is the focus of the image, of our self? We search for a motifs and a focus through several images in the mirrors. We search for motifs and focuses in our lives.

The beginnings of Alice’s two books in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass seem to have a link. When Alice enters into the mirror and joins her image with her own body it enters another world, just as when it falls into a hole in the first book. This is a metaphor.

Metaphor is the communication of thought from one level of abstraction using elements of another level of abstraction.

As children we are educated, but our educators can never teach us why we are being educated. We would not understand, one level of abstraction depends on the other. We are taught by metaphors. Taught that the sum that an apple plus an apple contains the same concept as an orange plus an orange. This concept is that 1 + 1 = 2. This step opens a new world to the child. An example of a process of formal abstraction is mathematics. After we understand that 1 + 1 = 2. We abstract the number once again: x + x = 2x. We can continue further using more advanced mathematics topics like vector spaces, set theory, theory of categories, theory of types.

We can understand this process more deeply. What we discovered is the process of abstraction. The created abstraction process can be applied to all other fields.

Finally, this discovery of the processes of abstraction is fundamental to our knowledge of everything in life. To become wiser it is always necessary to abstract or metaphorize. Some people are on top others down. But even up and down is relative. Understand that each person is in a stage of reflection. Sometimes we have to listen carefully. Look for metaphors in the speeches of the wisest. And other times have the patience to create metaphors for people. So that other people can understand our message. Improve our relationship with ourselves and others.